Tips for improved page performance

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Home > Pages > Tips for improved page performance

Try these quick hacks to make your pages load faster, and watch your engagement and conversion rates improve.

In this lesson you'll learn:

How and why you should resize images
How and why you should minify third-party scripts
Why to skip WordPress and build your pages with Ontraport
The best ways to minimize embedded videos

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Transcript

Visitors don't wait around for slow pages. A page that loads fast keeps people on it long enough to read your offer and fill out your form. Here are four habits that keep your Ontraport pages quick, plus one more for pages with forms. If you built a website from scratch, you'd have to sort out hosting yourself. When you publish an Ontraport page, Ontraport hosts it for you, on a free Ontraport domain or on your own domain, and adds an SSL certificate automatically. Ontraport's tracking script is already installed on every Ontraport page too. So your job is what goes on the page, and that's where these tips come in. The easiest speed win is image size. A huge photo squeezed into a small column still downloads at full size, so visitors wait for pixels they never see. Before you upload an image, resize it to about the width it'll actually show at. A full-width background needs to be wide. An image in a narrow column doesn't. You don't need exact numbers, but don't go too small, or the image will look blurry on big screens. Then choose it in the Image element's settings. Scripts go in your page's Settings tab, under Custom Code, in the header, body or footer. Add only the ones you really need, like your Google Analytics tag or an ad pixel. Every extra script is one more thing the browser has to download and run before your page is ready. And you don't need to add Ontraport's own tracking script. It's already there. If you write your own code, in Custom Code or the Custom HTML element, run it through a minifier first. A minifier strips out the spaces and comments the browser doesn't need, so there's less to download. Keep in mind that Ontraport support can't write or troubleshoot custom code for you. You can show Ontraport pages on WordPress with the Ontrapages plugin. But then the page loads through your WordPress site, with its theme, hosting and plugins, and plugins can slow things down. If your main website runs on WordPress, you can host your Ontraport pages on a subdomain instead, like pages dot yourdomain dot com. Click your profile icon, then Administration, then Business Info, then Custom Domains, and click New custom domain. In the Hosting dropdown, choose Host Ontraport Pages on a subdomain only. Custom domains are available on paid accounts. The Publishing your pages lesson walks through the full setup. Each embedded video from YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia loads its player from another company's servers. One or two on a page is fine. A whole library of them will slow it down. If you have lots of videos, show an image thumbnail for each one instead, and link it to a separate page that holds the video. If your page has a form, click its Submit button, then Form Settings, and find the form processing speed settings. These boxes make Ontraport finish work before it sends the visitor to your thank-you page, and each one you check slows down the submission. Leave them unchecked unless your thank-you page needs that work done first. The exception is the conditions calculator. It's on by default so your conditional blocks show the right thing. So: size your images to fit, keep scripts to the ones you need, let Ontraport host your pages, go easy on embedded videos, and keep your form's processing settings lean. Next up: sharing pages with other Ontraport users.